Stream System

by Gerald Murnane

  I have always become alert whenever I have read in a book of fiction a reference to a character’s country estates. The ownership of a country estate has always seemed to me to add a further layer to a person: to suggest, as it were, far-reaching vistas within the person. “You see me here, among these walls of pale stone topped by pink blossoms,” I hear the person saying, “and you think of the places in my mind as being only the streets of this suburb—or this faubourg. You have not seen yet, at a further place in my mind, the leafy avenue leading to the circular driveway surrounding the vast lawn; the mansion whose upper windows overlook grassy countryside with a few trees in the distance, or a stream that is marked on certain mornings and evenings by strands of mist.”

  I read in Swann’s Way during January 1961 that Swann was the owner of a park and a country house along one of the two ways where the narrator and his parents went walking on Sundays. According to my memory, I learned at first that Swann’s park was bounded on one side at least by a white fence behind which grew numerous lilacs of both the white-flowering and the mauve-flowering varieties. Before I had read about that park and those lilacs, I had seen Swann in my mind as the drawler in plus-four trousers that I described earlier. After I had read about the white fence and the white and lilac-coloured flowers, I saw in my mind a different Swann.

  As anyone who has read my first book of fiction, Tamarisk Row, will know, the chief character of that book builds his first racecourse and first sees in his mind the district of Tamarisk Row while he kneels in the dirt under a lilac tree. As anyone will know who has read the piece “First Love” in my sixth book of fiction, Velvet Waters, the chief character of “First Love” decides, after many years of speculating about the matter, that his racing colours are lilac and brown. After I had first read about the park and the lilacs at Combray, I remembered having read earlier in Swann’s Way that Swann was a good friend of the Prince of Wales and a member of the Jockey Club. After I had remembered this, I saw Swann in my mind as having the suit and the hat and the bunched silver hair beneath the brim of his hat of the man from Apsley, far to the north-west of Warrnambool. I decided that Swann’s racing colours would have been a combination of white and lilac. In 1961 when I decided this, the only set of white and lilac colours that I had seen had been carried by a horse named Parentive, owned and trained by a Mr A. C. Gartner. I noticed today what I believe I had not previously noticed: although the one occasion when I saw the horse Parentive race was a Saturday at Caulfield Racecourse at some time during the late 1950s, Mr Gartner and his horse came from Hamilton, which, of course, is north-west from where I sit now and on the way to Apsley.

  One detail of my image of Monsieur Swann, the owner of racehorses, changed a few months later. In July 1961, I became the owner of a small book illustrated with reproductions of some of the works of the French artist Raoul Dufy. After I had seen the gentlemen in the mounting yards of the racecourses in those illustrations, I saw above the bunched silvery hair of Monsieur Swann in my mind not a grey hat with blue and green feathers but a black top hat.

  I first read the first of the twelve volumes of the 1969 Chatto and Windus edition of À la recherche du temps perdu, as I wrote earlier, in the late summer and the autumn of 1973, when I was thirty-four years of age. On a hot morning while I was still reading the first volume, I was lying with the book beside me on a patch of grass in my backyard in a north-eastern suburb of Melbourne. While my eyes were closed for a moment against the glare of the sun, I heard the buzzing of a large fly in the grass near my ear.

  Somewhere in À la recherche du temps perdu, I seem to remember, is a short passage about the buzzing of flies on warm mornings, but even if that passage is in the part of the text that I had read in 1961, I did not recall my having previously read about the buzzing of flies in Marcel Proust’s texts when the large fly buzzed in the grass near my ear in the late summer of 1973. What I recalled at that moment was one of those parcels of a few moments of seemingly lost time that the narrator of À la recherche du temps perdu warns us never deliberately to go in search of. The parcel came to me, of course, not as a quantity of something called time, whatever that may be, but as a knot of feelings and sensations that I had long before experienced and had not since recalled.

  The sensations that had been suddenly restored to me were those that I had experienced as a boy of fifteen years walking alone in the spacious garden of the house belonging to the widowed mother of my father in the city of Warrnambool in the south-west of Victoria on a Saturday morning of my summer holidays. The feelings that had been suddenly restored to me were feelings of expectancy and joy. On the Saturday morning in January 1954, I had heard the buzzing of a large fly while I had been looking at a bush of tiger lilies in bloom.

  As I write this on 28 July 1989, I notice for the first time that the colour of the tiger lilies in my mind resembles the colour of the cover of the biography of Marcel Proust by André Maurois that I quoted from in my fifth book of fiction, Inland. The passage that I quoted from in that book includes the phrase invisible yet enduring lilacs, and I have just now understood that that phrase ought to be the title of this piece of writing … Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs.

  My book Inland includes a passage about tiger lilies that I wrote while I saw in my mind the blooms on the bush of tiger lilies that I was looking at when I heard the large fly buzzing in January 1954.

  I had felt expectancy and joy on the Saturday morning in January 1954 because I was going to go later on that day to the so-called summer meeting at Warrnambool racecourse. Although I was already in love with horse-racing, I was still a schoolboy and seldom had the money or the time for going to race meetings. On that Saturday morning, I had never previously been to a race meeting at Warrnambool. The buzzing of the fly was connected in my mind with the heat of the afternoon to come and with the dust and the dung in the saddling paddock. I had felt a particular expectancy and joy on that morning while I had pronounced to myself the name tiger lily and while I had stared at the colours of the blooms on the bush. The names of the racehorses of the Western District of Victoria and the racing colours of their owners were mostly unknown to me in 1954. On that Saturday morning, I was trying to see in my mind the colours, unfamiliar and striking, carried by some horse that had been brought to Warrnambool from a hundred miles away in the north-west, and I was trying to hear in my mind the name of that horse.

  During the morning in the late summer of 1973 when I heard the buzzing of the large fly soon after I had begun to read the first of the twelve volumes of À la recherche du temps perdu, the feelings that came back to me from the Saturday morning nineteen years before only added to the feelings of expectancy and joy that I had already felt as I had prepared to read the twelve volumes. On that morning in my backyard in 1973, I had been aware for twelve years that one of the important place-names in À la recherche du temps perdu had the power to bring to my mind details of a place such as I had wanted to see in my mind during most of my life. That place was a country estate in my mind. The owner of the estate spent his mornings in his library, where the windows overlooked grassy countryside with a few trees in the distance, and his afternoons exercising his racehorses. Once each week, he travelled a hundred miles and more with one of his horses and with his distinctive silk racing colours south-east to a race meeting.

  At some time during 1949, several years before I had attended any race-meeting or had heard the name of Marcel Proust, my father told me that he had carved his name at two places in the sandstone that underlies the district of Allansford where he was born and where his remains have lain buried since 1960. The first of the two places was a pinnacle of rock standing high out of the water in the bay known as Childers Cove. My father told me in 1949 that he had once swum through the fifty yards of turbulent water between the shore and Steeple Rock with a tomahawk tied to his body and had carved his name and the date on the side of Steeple Rock that faced the Southern Ocean. The second of the two places was the wall of a quarr
y on a hill overlooking the bays of the Southern Ocean known as Stanhopes’ Bay, Sandy Bay, and Murnane’s Bay, just south-east of Childers Cove.

  During the first twenty-five years after my father had died, I thought about neither of the two places where he had once carved his name. Then, in 1985, twenty-five years after my father had died, and while I was writing a piece of fiction about a man who had read a story about a man who thought often about the bedrock far beneath his feet, an image of a stone quarry came into my mind and I wrote that the father of the narrator of the story had carved his name on the wall of a quarry, and I gave the title “Stone Quarry” to my piece of fiction, which until then had lacked a title.

  At some time during the spring of 1985 and while I was still writing “Stone Quarry,” I received through the post a page of the Warrnambool Standard illustrated by two reproductions of photographs. The first of the two photographs was of Childers Cove as it had appeared for as long as European persons had looked at it, with Steeple Rock standing out of the water fifty metres from shore and the Southern Ocean in the background. The second photograph showed Childers Cove as it has appeared since the day or the night in 1985 when waves of the Southern Ocean caused Steeple Rock to topple and the surfaces of sandstone where my father had carved his name to sink beneath the water.

  In the autumn of 1989, while I was making notes for this piece of writing but before I had thought of mentioning my father in the writing, a man who was about to travel with a camera from Melbourne to the district of Allansford offered to bring back to me photographs of any places that I might wish to see in photographs.

  I gave the man directions for finding the quarry on the hill overlooking the Southern Ocean and asked him to look on the walls of the quarry for the inscription that my father had told me forty years before that he had carved.

  Two days ago, on 28 July 1989, while I was writing the earlier passage that has to do with the buzzing of a fly near a bush of tiger lilies at Warrnambool in 1954, I found among the mail that had just arrived at my house a coloured photograph of an area of sandstone in which four letters and four numerals are visible. The four numerals 1-9-2-1 allow me to believe that my father stood in front of the area of sandstone in the year 1921, when he was aged seventeen years and when Marcel Proust was aged fifty years, as I am today, and had one year of his life remaining. The four letters allow me to believe that my father in 1921 carved in the sandstone the first letter of the first of his given names followed by all the letters of his surname but that rainwater running down the wall of the quarry caused part of the sandstone to break off and to fall away at some time during the sixty-eight years between 1921 and 1989, leaving only the letter R for Reginald followed by the first three letters of my father’s and my surname.

  I have a number of photographs of myself standing in one or another garden and in front of one or another wall, but the earliest of these photographs shows me standing, in the year 1940, on a patch of grass in front of a wall of sandstone that is part of a house on its sunlit side. The wall that I mentioned earlier—the wall that appears as an image in my mind together with the image of a small boy and the image of a bed of tall flowers whenever I try to imagine myself first reading the first pages of À la recherche du temps perdu—is not the same wall that appears in bright sunlight in the photograph of myself in 1940. The wall in my mind is a wall of the same house that I stood beside on a day of sunshine in 1940, but the wall in my mind is a wall on the shaded side of the house. (I have already explained that the image of the boy in my mind is an image of a boy who was first photographed thirty years before the day of sunshine in 1940.)

  The house with the walls of sandstone was built by my father’s father less than one kilometre from where the Southern Ocean forms the bay known as Sandy Bay, which is next to the bays known as Murnane’s Bay and Childers Cove on the south-west coast of Victoria. All the walls of the house were quarried from the place where the surname of the boy who appears in my mind as listening and staring whenever I remember myself first reading about Combray now appears as no more than the letters MUR … the root in the Latin language, the language of my father’s religion, of the word for wall.

  At the summer race meeting at Warrnambool racecourse in January 1960, which was the last summer meeting before the death of my father and the second-last summer meeting before my first reading the first part of À la recherche du temps perdu, I read in my racebook the name of a racehorse from far to the north-west of Warrnambool. The name was a place-name consisting of two words. The first of the two was a word that I had never previously read but a word that I supposed was from the French language. The second word was the word Bay. The colours to be worn by the rider of the horse were brown and white stripes.

  I found the name and the colours of the horse peculiarly attractive. During the afternoon, I looked forward to seeing the owner of the horse and his colours in the mounting yard. However, when the field was announced for the race in which the horse had been entered, I learned that the horse had been scratched.

  During the twelve months following that race meeting, I often pronounced in my mind the name of the racehorse with the name ending in the word Bay. During the same time, I often saw in my mind the brown and white colours carried by the horse. During the same time also, I saw in my mind images of a sheep or cattle property in the far west of Victoria in my mind (that is, north-west of the south-west of Victoria in my mind) and of the owner of the property, who lived in a house with a vast library. However, none of the images of the sheep or cattle property or of the owner of the property or of his vast library has appeared in my mind since January 1961, when I read in Swann’s Way the first of the two words of the horse’s name.

  In January 1961, I learned from the paperback volume with the title Swann’s Way that the word that I had previously known only as part of the name of a racehorse that had been entered in a race at Warrnambool racecourse, as though its owner and its trainer were going to bring the horse out of the north-west in the same way that the horse had been brought in the dream that had mattered most to my father, was the name of one of the places that mattered most to the narrator of Swann’s Way from among the places around Combray, where he spent his holidays in each year of his childhood.

  After I had learned this, I saw in my mind whenever I said to myself the name of the horse that had not arrived at Warrnambool racecourse from the north-west, or whenever I saw in my mind a silk jacket with brown and white stripes, a stream flowing through grassy countryside with trees in the background. I saw the stream at one point flowing past a quiet reach that I called in my mind a bay.

  A bay in a stream might have seemed a geographical absurdity, but I saw in my mind the calm water, the green rushes, the green grass in the fields behind the rushes. I saw in the green fields in my mind the white fence topped by the white and lilac flowers of the lilac bushes on the estate of the man with the bunched silvery hair who had named one of his racehorses after a geographical absurdity or a proper noun in the works of Marcel Proust. I saw, at the place named Apsley in my mind, far to the north-west of Warrnambool in my mind, enduring lilacs that had previously been invisible.

  At some time during the seven years since I last read the whole of À la recherche du temps perdu, I looked into my Times Atlas of the World and learned that the racehorse whose name I had read in the racebook at Warrnambool twelve months before I first read Swann’s Way had almost certainly not been named after any geographical feature in France or after any word in the works of Marcel Proust but had almost certainly been named after a bay on the south coast of Kangaroo Island, off the coast of South Australia.

  Since my having learned that the horse that failed to arrive from the north-west at Warrnambool racecourse in the last summer of my father’s life and the last summer before I first read the fiction of Marcel Proust was almost certainly named after a bay on Kangaroo Island, I have sometimes seen in my mind, soon after I have pronounced in my mind the name of the horse or soon af
ter I have seen in my mind a silk jacket with brown and white stripes, waves of the Southern Ocean rolling from far away in the direction of South Africa, rolling past Kangaroo Island towards the south-west coast of Victoria, and breaking against the base of Steeple Rock in Childers Cove, near Murnane’s Bay, and causing Steeple Rock at last to topple. I have sometimes seen in my mind, soon after Steeple Rock has toppled in my mind, a wall of a stone house and near the wall a small boy who will later, as a young man, choose for his colours lilac from the white and lilac colours of the Monsieur Swann in his mind and brown from the white and brown colours of the racehorse in his mind from far to the north-west of Warrnambool: the racehorse whose name he will read for the first time in a racebook in the last summer before he reads for the first time a book of fiction with the title Swann’s Way. And I have sometimes seen in my mind, soon after I have seen in my mind the things just mentioned, one or another detail of a place in my mind where I see together things that I might have expected to lie forever far apart; where rows of lilacs appear on a sheep or cattle property; where my father, who had never heard the name Marcel Proust, is the narrator of an immense and intricately patterned work of fiction; where a racehorse has for its name the word Bay preceded by the word Vivonne.

  As It Were a Letter

  On the day before I began to write this piece of fiction, I received in the post two items from a man who was born when I was already eleven years of age. That man, whose name is not part of this piece of fiction, has the same urge that Vladimir Nabokov attributed to himself in the early pages of his book Speak, Memory: the urge to learn more and more about the years just before his conception and birth. The man often questions me about what I remember from the eleven years when I was alive and he was not. The man claims that what I tell him adds to the sum of what he knows about himself.